[Pat] wasn’t exactly pretty; her face had too much honest intelligence for that.

Lester Del Rey, 1951

I own several anthologies written or edited by Lester Del Rey. I have probably read that sentence thirty times. But, for the first time, it grated across my nerves. Pat is an engineer, and isn’t considered ‘pretty’ because of her ‘honest intelligence’. So, from this sentence we can assume the narrator believes intelligence women aren’t pretty, and pretty women aren’t honest or intelligent. That is every woman I know insulted, and most more than once.

“Good heavens, Miss Sakamoto! You’re beautiful!”

The sad thing is … things haven’t changed much since 1951, when Lester wrote this sentence.

English is not the easiest language to learn, because it isn’t very logical. I can remember how frustrated my youngest child was with her first grade spelling, trying to understand how ‘going’ and ‘doing’ were spelt as if they rhymed, when they did nothing of the sort. But it isn’t just our spelling and pronunciation that can be a bugbear; our idioms can also be a conundrum for both writers and speakers.

Look at how the words ‘black’ and ‘white’ can have a multitude of meaning. We can’t just assume black symbolises bad, and that white stands for good.

Black had traditionally been seen as unlucky, sinister, or downright evil. There is a large number of sayings, similes, and idioms that use black in this sense: to be listed in someone’s black books, the black sheep of the family, black hats (particularly in Westerns), to blackball a candidate, to be black-hearted, to be in a black mood, to give a black look, to be blacklisted, to have a black mark against your name, the black arts, unlucky to have a black cat cross your path, black magic (as opposed to white magic), to blacken someone’s name, blackmail… I’ll stop now, because I am sure you have the idea. And yet, to be in the black has the positive connotation of having money in the bank and not being in debt.

White is generally use to represent innocence and purity: as pure/white as the driven snow, white as a lily, white as a swan (Australian swans are black), fair skin is aristocratic, as mild as milk, brides wearing white to their weddings, little white lies, wearing white to your baptism, the white glove test for cleanliness, and so on and so forth. However, white seems to have more negative connotations than black has positive ones. White lips are a sign of pain or sadness – such as pale with suffering, or of anger – think of a white-hot fury. White skin can be pasty. If you are frightened, you are lily-livered and may need to be handed a white feather to shame you for your cowardice. You surrender by waving a white flag.

So, as you can see, the use of black or white in a metaphor isn’t black and white, and has something of a chequered history. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) If you are using black or white in your prose, you have to make sure that your audience knows exactly what your trying to say by using them. For example: “Her horse was as black and as gentle as the night, and as beautiful as the stars therein.” From the deliberate use of the word ‘gentle’ you can surmise this steed isn’t a black charger snorting brimstone. But if ‘gentle’ had been left out, you might be uncertain of the nature of the black horse. A milk-white horse might not need the word ‘gentle’, because – as previously noted – as milk is generally associated with mildness. So if you have a wicked white steed, you need to make that clear from the start.

So, as you can see, English can be confusing for those who have grown up speaking it. I can’t imagine what it must be like for people trying to learn it as a second language.

As a writer, my goal is clarity in my prose.But sometimes even the most careful writer will make a mistake. Take a look at the comic just above this paragraph. In all honestly, I can see me writing a sentence like this and not noticing the ambiguity of meaning, particularly if I was caught up in the storytelling. And I might not pick it up in the edits, because it will seem to make perfect sense in the context of the story. I might even miss this flaw in the proofreading stage, because writers often become blind to their own mistakes. This is why it is always a good idea to have one or two friends prepared to cast an eye over your work for typos and plot holes and ambiguous sentences.

This isn’t my only writing flaw. I’m not good with settings, unless I really concentrate. I tend to overuse the word ‘it’. I like adverbs (please don’t hate me). But these are flaws I can generally pick up when I am doing my edits.

Writers are only human. Achieving perfect means lots of hard work … and no writer ever looks at a finished piece of work and says “That’ll do.” I have a mental vision of most writers refusing to die because they have just one more correction to make. Sometimes our manuscripts have to be crow-barred out of our clutches. This is because we know that the minute our little word baby is released to the world, we are going to find a mountain of mistakes we never saw before.

But you can’t just hang onto your work forever. Even the most dedicated word nerd needs to finish that manuscript (I feel such a hypocrite while writing this sentence). If you’ve spent the time and the trouble to get your story nigh on perfect, it’s time to share, even if it just with a beta-reader or two.

When you are writing Steampunk, you are writing Science Fiction. When you are writing Science Fiction, your characters have to maintain a plausible level of scientific knowledge, and the setting and plot need to maintain a similar level of scientific verisimilitude. They all need to walk the walk and talk the talk. All scientists use jargon, and different scientific fields use different jargon.

A little research will provide you with a working vocabulary in your chosen field. For example, if you are writing about botany, you need to know what the various bits of a plant are called, and have a little background knowledge in plant classification. A botanist would know the difference between a deciduous tree and evergreen tree, or a stamen and a pistil, but they might be completely clueless about how electricity works. Jargon is very specific to its field. (And I loathe how every scientist on television is an expert in every different sort of science. That is lazy writing.)

You can make your own jargon up, in fact, I would encourage you to give it a go. However, it has to be consistent. If your characters use a newly-coined word in one situation, they should use that word all the time. A good example of this technique is used in the webcomic Girl Genius; everyone with a natural affinity and intuitive talent for making gadgets are called ‘sparks’. This term never jars, as it is used consistently to refer to these gifted individuals.

It is possible to write a Steampunk novel without using jargon, but as the genre is all about science, it is harder to write without using scientific jargon. When you are using jargon, don’t assume the reader knows what the jargon means. You can include a glossary for these terms, but I recommend explaining the meaning of the term when you first use it in the text. There are a couple techniques that can achieve this result. You can have a character explain the meaning of the unfamiliar term to another character, the unknowledgeable character maybe a new apprentice, maybe a visiting relative, whatever. You can put in a footnote with a definition of the term – I tend to favour this method, because a reader who does know the term can skip the footnote. Or you can just explain it!

It wouldn’t hurt to know who were the giants in your field at the time of narrative. For example, if you were a botanist in 1871, you’d know who Henry Lecog was, who Anna Atkins was (a topic for another post), and that Joseph Hooker was in charge of Kew Gardens. Anyone who is well known to a botanist is part of their jargon. If a person from 1871 was to lack the knowledge of Atkin’s cyanotype photograms of plants, that person would not be a botanist.

Jargon can be fun. It is almost like a secret language – which was its original intent, to help keep guide secrets. Using jargon will make you narrative both more interesting and more authentic.